Eric Van Nielsen

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Eric Van Nielsen works with both primed and unprimed canvas to create stunning abstract pieces.

Eric Van Nielsen is an abstract expressionist painter who began his career as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. There he studied under such painters as Jan Baltzell and Alex Kanevsky. Prior to his time at the academy he mentored with Bucks County impressionist painter Robert Beck. In 2015, he moved from representational painting to abstraction, which led to three successful solo shows in Philadelphia as well as a month-long artist residency in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France.

Eric’s work draws a clear line from his major influences Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler of the mid-century abstract expressionism school in New York to more modern aesthetics developed by post modern painters such as Gerhard Richter. His pieces share a close-knit relationship with music, which is a quintessential part of his process. Musical artists such as Bach, Bill Evans, Philip Glass and Radiohead all create the same energy and space in their work that Eric seeks to depict with paint.

To Eric, paintings offer the viewer a visually stimulated liberation from the static of everyday life in the modern world through the adept manipulation of form, composition and color. In turn, paintings can be thought of as experiences in and of themselves, just as a moving musical composition, rather than an inanimate object intended for mild aesthetic pleasure. The artists who cultivated such philosophies with their work developed a conversation with others like them through time that still speaks to the human condition and experience; Eric’s paintings seek to participate in that conversation.